Federal inquiry into Optus outage
The Albanese Government will undertake a telecommunications review into the Optus outage that affected millions of Australians.
Connectivity was “absolutely essential” for consumers and businesses, and the impacts of Wednesday’s outage were particularly concerning, federal Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said on Thursday.
The Optus shutdown hit SA government agencies including SA Health, with hospital switchboards offline and “substantial inconvenience” caused, although Premier Peter Malinauskas said there was no clinical affect on patients.
The Premier criticised Optus for its lack of communications during the telecommunications crisis.
“We are disappointed with Optus, they’ve let their customers down across the state, including the government,” he said.
“Optus need to respond swiftly, communicate effectively with everybody about exactly what is going on here. Telecommunications now is central to the functioning of the Australian economy, and it has a big impact on services across governments.
“And if Optus wants to see government as a customer then they need to be able to be a reliable service.”
Rowland said that while Optus gradually restored services, it was “critical the government conducts a process to identify lessons to be learned from yesterday’s outage”.
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The minister said she would task her department with developing the terms of reference for a post-incident review. Further announcements around the terms of reference and next steps will be made in due course.
“It is critical that industry and governments take stock following large-scale outages, given no network is immune,” Rowland said she hoped the review would also help support major telecommunications providers to improve post-outage processes.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority has independently commenced an assessment to investigate Optus’ compliance with the rules on emergency calls.
The telecommunications watchdog is urging small businesses to get in contact with Optus to discuss options for compensation.
“What we would encourage you to do is contact Optus and … help them understand what the impact was on them and their earnings,” Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman Cynthia Gebert said.
“That’s the sort of thing that we think you need to tell Optus so they get a sense of what sort of compensation might be the right thing to do for your circumstances.”
Gebert said the scale of the outage was unacceptable as it impacted emergency services and hospitals in addition to small businesses and transport services.
Businesses are counting the costs after the nationwide outage ground trading to a halt, as attention turns to compensation and a parliamentary inquiry into what caused the crash.
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More than 10 million customers and businesses were thrown into disarray from about 4am, with customers prevented from connecting to the internet or making or receiving calls.
It took more than 12 hours to restore services.
There are calls for the company to explain why the nation’s second-most popular telecommunications network went down.
The Greens are pushing for an inquiry in the Senate.
Businesses had been dealt multiple blows, a day after the Reserve Bank increased interest rates, National Retail Association director Rob Godwin said.
“This is costing businesses thousands of dollars in sales that they are now in dire need of given yesterday’s rate hike,” he said.
Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said she understood how much people relied on the connectivity and indicated the company would consider how to compensate them.
‘We’re now starting to think about ways in which we can thank our customers for their patience as we work through the outage today and reward them for their loyalty to Optus,” she said.
“We will definitely consider every avenue as we turn our attention, now that services are restored, to how we work with our customers.”
Close to 10 million Optus customers had their personal information stolen when the company’s data system was breached last year.
The telco believes a network fault was behind Wednesday’s outage.
People weren’t able to call triple zero on landline devices, although it was still possible to do so on a mobile phone.
Public infrastructure including Melbourne’s metropolitan train network ground to a halt early on Wednesday before slowly resuming with major delays throughout the morning peak.
Service NSW call centres, Victoria’s virtual emergency department and Northern Health hospital phone lines were also down.
-with AAP
